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Roots & Rivers

An interactive guide to South Asian cultures for high school students. Learn where the traditions in your family (or your best friend's family) come from, and what they mean.

Start Chapter 1 See all chapters

Mora the peacock, the book's guide, waving hello

22chapters
22interactive sims
8countries
368concepts in the learning graph

What this book is

South Asia is eight countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Together they're home to about 1.99 billion people (2025), roughly one in four people on Earth. Millions of families in the United States, including here in Minnesota, carry its traditions.

A lot of us grew up with those traditions and never learned the "why". Why does Diwali move every year? Why does your grandmother have a different word for your mother's brother and your father's brother? Why do so many scripts look different but work the same way? This book answers those questions, one chapter at a time.

Every chapter has:

  • A story with Zara and Ben, two Minnesota sophomores figuring this out together
  • An interactive MicroSim you can play with: spin a festival calendar, clap a rhythm cycle, draw a kolam, build a thali
  • A "Whose Story?" box that shows how different communities tell the same history
  • Ask Your Elders, a short interview guide for talking with your own family or community
  • A quiz, practice questions and sources you can check

Part 1: Foundations

  1. What Is South Asia?
  2. Ancient Roots
  3. Empires and Encounters
  4. Colonialism, Independence, and Partition
  5. Faiths of South Asia
  6. Languages and Scripts

Part 2: Living Culture

{start="7"} 7. Festivals Through the Year 8. Food and the Table 9. Music 10. Dance and Theater 11. Art, Architecture, and Craft 12. Clothing and Textiles 13. Family, Names, and Life Events 14. Stories and Literature 15. Cinema, Cricket, and Pop Culture 16. Science, Math, and Ideas

Part 3: The Eight Countries

{start="17"} 17. India 18. Pakistan and Afghanistan 19. Bangladesh and Sri Lanka 20. Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives

Part 4: Here and Now

{start="21"} 21. The South Asian Diaspora 22. Bring It Home

Who it's for

  • Students who want to understand their own heritage, or a friend's. No background needed.
  • Teachers looking for free, sourced material for world history, geography or the new ethnic studies courses. See For Teachers.
  • Clubs: South Asian student associations can run a full year of meetings from the Club Kit.
  • Families: the Ask Your Elders guides are a good excuse for a long conversation at dinner.

Free and open

Roots & Rivers is free, has no ads and needs no login. It's licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, so teachers and clubs can copy and adapt it. Every fact is sourced. If you find a mistake, please report it; corrections are logged in public.

Created by Aaryav Sharma, a member of the board of the South Asian Student Association at Eastview High School in Apple Valley, Minnesota.